Matthew Minicucci
I would be so much more manageable as memory. Like my mother. Like the blue house I grew red in. Like the four days in Delphos with you. New, like nothing of the sort. Faculty I’m mindful of; mortified in flesh. Made mighty by little nothings you do not say. Never, like your hair once traced on my chest. Nor, not, neither of these things are true because there aren’t two things. There’s you. There’s this notion of red which is caught like my hand on the throat of the world. There’s a street between you and I don’t know what else to do. You dark sidereal glance. You spot in the sunshine succumbed to so many holy days. Ray, like this current cathode. Even my heart misunderstands the nothing as it is wont to do. I have something to say about science. I feel prescient in this previous iteration of anger. I finally, after all these years, feel between. What might these imperfect hands be for, you ask? I would say the once broken culled from their girders, garters, the white nothing of each memory. All these things have thus found an end, Circe said to Odysseus. Fair-tressed, dread goddess. Yes, when we leave this river of ocean, what sea to see left? There is a question, and I ask it. And then I ask to bury the body. And then I ask for single day, this journeé. And then I ask for one more night. And then I ask for this.
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Matthew Minicucci is an award-winning author of three collections of poetry. His next, Dual, will be out Fall 2023 from Acre Books. His poems and essays have appeared in journals including The American Poetry Review, The Believer, The Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, Poetry, and The Southern Review. He is currently an Assistant Professor in the Blount Scholars Program at the University of Alabama.